AM/FM

Plug Research; 2010

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Most of the time, listening to commercial radio is an exercise in patience-testing entropy, a way to fill space with noise in the hopes that something interesting will sneak up on you. The blip of abbreviated sound clips bridged by the static of switching stations has become sonic shorthand in postmodern pop music for a good reason. Exile's 2009 album, Radio, was a jumbled, quasi-Steinski sample collage that tried to make some kind of sense of all that airwave debris. In the process, the West Coast indie hip-hop beatmaker played up a sort of assaultive, yammering overload you only get from that particular medium. He sabotaged some interesting post-Prefuse 73 beats in the bargain, too, obscuring his fine-tuned sense of nuanced production techniques with a lot of uncharacteristically obvious pseudo-comedic nonsense. But that's what remix albums are for, right?

Eh. AM/FM does give some of Exile's peers a shot at reinterpreting Radio's plunderphonic drive-time routine, and given the structure of the original album, it actually seems like a logical conclusion. But while the introduction of other producers gives the raw material the sort of thematic eclecticism that Radio's one-man aesthetic only met halfway, it also means that it comes across like one of those freeform shows where the DJ just throws incoherent sets together at the last minute.

Most of AM/FM falls in that odd space between familiar California underground rap (with appearances by the likes of Blu, Fashawn, and a couple of dudes from Living Legends) and the West Coast's hazy, psychedelic mutations of neo-soul. For instance, there are two remixes of "It's Coming Down", a burbling, soulful Detroit-style beat in its original form. One of the remixes, by Shafiq Husayn, is a slow-boiling mess of noodly synthesizers and false-start basslines that eventually oozes its way into some kind of vaguely funky lava-gurgle throb. The other one takes the source beat and adds Alchemist and Evidence going all classic-backpacker over it. Well, at least it's versatile.

That does seem to make a sort of sense if you picture that dichotomy as the same one alluded to in the title-- two different approaches on two different wavelengths, just like the Top 40 vs. freeform disc jockey split between the AM and FM bands a few decades back. But it doesn't make for the most consistent listening, and whether the MCs are at their best (Blu on "Love Line"; the Fashawn/Blame One/Big Tone/ADaD montage on "Mega Mix") or just filling space (Grouch & Eligh on "Population Control"), they do a better job of adding something new to the tracks than the knob-twiddling guest producers do.

Aside from a couple of revamps of "In Love"'s soul-jazz breaks by Milo1 (a short but sweet Dilla-style transformation) and DJ Day (throwing a fiercer break beneath the stand-up bassline), most of the altered beats are tweaked for the worse. What do "In Love", "Population Control", or "In Tune" have to gain from being turned into chirpily inebriated junkshop-band rehearsals by Clutchy Hopkins, Samiyam, or Assembly Line? AM/FM isn't cohesive, it drops two unremarkable-at-best songs for every interesting one, and it sounds like it's trying too hard to get your attention. At least that makes it a lot like actual radio.